Re: Language universal?

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, jesse stephen bangs wrote:

> Musing on a new thread here . . .
>
> A while ago, someone mentioned that prepositions do not ever govern the
> nominative case in languages that mark case.  Unfortunately, my conlang
> Yivríndil does just that, and so I says to myself, "This won't do.  I
> don't mind breaking a language universal every now and then, since they
> all have *some* exceptions, but this one was claimed to have *no*
> exceptions!  And I don't want to be the only exception out there, since I
> strive for naturalness in my lang."  So I did a little syntactic
> slight-of-hand and decided that prepositions govern the accusative case,
> which is cheating since *the accusative case is never marked*.  There was
> an accusative ending that survived in pronouns until a few hundred years
> ago (con-timeline), but it's fallen out of use.
>
> Is this cheating?  And can anybody come up with a natlang counterexample
> to this language universal?  If not, I claim first dibs on the
> self-referential Jesse's Language Universal: "All language universals have
> exceptions."
Not cheating at all; you just re-interpreted your evidence.

But I don't think that is a universal.  Attic Greek, I seem to recall, has
some prepositions that govern the nominative, doesn't it?  Esperanto marks
case, and its prepositions govern the nominative (okay, not a natlang, but
still).

You might say that in your langauge, originally prepositions governed the
accusative case, but when nouns lost their accusative endings, by analogy
they began governing the nominative of pronouns as well.  Much as in
English: "between you and I."